Why Do Some Advertisers Believe That 90% Of Facebook Ad Clicks Are From Bots?

Eric Jackson
, ContributorI write about technology and media.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

To listen to the Facebook (FB) earnings call last week, you would have thought that the management

Image via CrunchBase

team passionately cares about their users' experience and the care and feeding of their advertising clients.

Here's Mark Zuckerberg discussing how complex Facebook's internal systems are to track user behavior and the effectiveness of various ad campaigns:

at any given point, we have a lot of different tests, different algorithms running, and we measure engagement of everything downstream from News Feed and the whole system, right? So obviously, clicks and engagement and feedback in News Feed, how many people want to share, but also how many page views and how much time people spend on Facebook overall, ad performance, everything, down to all of the different tweaks that we do in News Feed, and user sentiment as well. So I think we have pretty robust systems that are built out around this. And one of the things that I think is pretty interesting is what we've seen is that we can put in good sponsored content and have it not degrade those metrics. So that's really what we're trying to do, is we're rolling some of these Sponsored Stories out more conservatively because we want to make sure that the quality is very high. And we're basically continuing to run those tests to make sure that we are producing the best product that we can.

And here is a quote from Sheryl Sandberg on how Facebook is working to give its smaller advertisers the tools to be successful with their Facebook ads:

our third area of progress has been to make it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to advertise on Facebook. Local business advertising is considered by many to be the Holy Grail of Internet advertising since the market opportunity is so great. This is proving difficult, however, because small business owners often lack the time or ability to adopt new technology. Facebook is uniquely accessible to them. As they typically learn to use Facebook by setting up personal profiles or Timelines, they then discover the value our service can provide them as business owners. Many of the world's approximately 60 million business owners are already Facebook users. Over 11 million businesses already have pages on Facebook. Over 7 million of these pages are actively used each and every month. In addition, hundreds of thousands of small businesses advertise with us. By making it easier to create a business page and run ads, we believe we can increase the number of small and local businesses who use our tools.

Yet, there are two stories out this morning about small businesses who are frustrated with their Facebook ad experience.

The first was reported in Benzinga (via CNET). In it, the owner complains that Facebook has tried to charge them $2,000 to change its name on its own Facebook page. The analytics are poor and they estimate that 80% of the clicks they get on their Facebook page and Facebook ads are from bots:

"They're scumbags and we just don't have the patience for scumbags," said musician and label-based company Limited Run when discussing its decaying relationship with Facebook (NASDAQ: FB).... While testing Facebook's advertising system, Limited Run noticed it could only verify about 20 percent of the clicks that were supposedly being converted to users showing up on its Web site. After trying a few analytics services to figure out the remaining traffic, the company built its own software out of exasperation," CNET reported, stating that bots were to blame for loading pages and driving up costs.

In a second blog post, Erik Larson had similar complaints, only he estimated that 90% of his Facebook clicks were from spambots.

Erik was frustrated when he first suspected he was getting a lot of fake clicks from his campaign and contacted Facebook customer support. Suddenly, the amazing analytics that Facebook has were not available for this advertiser. Here is the response from Neil in Facebook Global Marketing Support:

we are happy to look into this further if you can provide us with detailed click logs documenting the activity you’re concerned about. We aren’t able to investigate this further without actual traffic logs. We understand this may be a frustrating process, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact your web hosting company directly if you have questions about how to obtain server logs detailing individual clicks or visits to your site, as we aren’t able to verify data collected through third-party tracking systems. In order to assist you further, please include the following information from your server logs:

(A) Raw server logs of all clicks coming to your website, or the total amount of all clicks coming from Facebook, with an explanation of how you filtered them. These server logs should, at the very least, include:

(1) Timestamp of page load (2) User agent string (3) User IP (4) Exact page loaded, with the parameters passed to the page load if you are doing URL tagging. Please note: a popular tracking method is to link your Facebook Ad(s) to unique URLs that are only used for specific Facebook Ad campaigns. Another tracking method is to add an extra, identifying parameter to your URL. By doing so, you’ll be able to isolate visitors who reach your site through Facebook Ads rather than other traffic sources.

(B) Aggregated counts of your clicks.

If possible, please also include the following: (1) The total number of clicks you received from Facebook, split by day, for the specific time period where you have noticed the click issues. (2) The total number of clicks you were billed for, by Facebook, also by billable day for the period in question. (3) A screenshot of your external reporting system showing the total number of clicks received from Facebook.

After some back and forth with the Facebook customer support, and some further digging on his own, Larson sends this response by email:

The problem is that Facebook misled my company with respect to the inherent value of most of the clicks by claiming that these clicks were comparable in value to clicks in other CPC venues or to clicks by FB users with typical and expected interactions with CPC advertising (emphasis added). To be specific, I believe that about 90 percent clicks you charged us for were worth about 1/1000th of the price you charged us. It also seems likely that your company was aware of this disparity in value, because after looking at the data some more it feels like you must have some sort of algorithm in place that invalidates clicks from these users once they pass a certain threshold, but probably you only invalidate clicks after that threshold, not all the clicks that came before. Even more, that threshold appears to be WAY above what any reasonable advertiser would expect it to be.

Specifically, my gut feel is that you allow valid clicks as long as people click fewer than ~4-6 rapid-fire clicks in a minute, and then after that point you invalidate their clicks within a very short session period, probably around an hour or two, but you do not go back and do what everyone would expect you to do and invalidate the first ~4-6 clicks. Further, I imagine you have a very high threshold for clicks in a day, probably ~40-60 daily, and similar to the rapid-fire clicks you do not go back and invalidate the first ~40-60 clicks. It also seems like you have no algorithm at all based on how many annual or total likes a user has, which is somewhat shocking since combining such an long-term algorithm with a rapid-fire algorithm and a daily algorithm would be the best way to identify ‘booklicants’ or ‘likers’ or whatever you want to call this group of users. I’ll continue to call them booklicants because from an advertiser’s perspective they are as much a creation of your product interface as they are regular people with rational interests.

He goes on to describe his personal story using Facebook ads:

I started out advertising my external landing pages like a typical CPC campaign. The CTRs and landing page conversions were terrible but my ads appeared to perform better than the average FB ads, so it felt OK, and the demographics of the clicks validated some of our segmentation assumptions. Then since your app and your marketing highly encourage use of ads to market internal FB content, and you promise much more detailed data about the users, I spiffed up our FB page and ran my first ‘like us’ campaign. WOW! Hundreds of people in less than an hour, and the CPCs were 20-30 percent lower! So I did it some more, right then, spent more money, eventually $170 instead of the $30-50 I’d planned on. It was exciting.

Then I did a little bit to try to get engagement from those users, a few posts to the page, and nothing happened. I read more about how building engagement is a skill that requires investment, and I also began to look into sponsored stories. Luckily, in parallel I was analyzing my fan base and discovered they were not what they appeared to be at first. They were mostly ’booklicants’ who like dozens of things a day. So I didn’t do sponsored stories, I sent you a note asking for my money back. If I had done sponsored stories and managed to get into their streams, then no doubt some of those users would have engaged, because they clearly use FB a lot and I would have been jamming my message in front of their faces…which is what I thought I was doing in the first place, btw. But I bet the competition for those particular streams is relatively intense, not because they are more valuable and more advertisers want to compete for them, but because those people typically like thousands of advertisers, and since I was a small advertiser with an audience comprised primarily of booklicants this would have hit me hardest.